I hope that whatever solutions we come up with to handle the too-many-dependencies problem don’t stifle people’s motivation to create and share new packages. It’s not a given that useful libraries are going to exist. Too much friction and people will just stop sharing code.
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It really depends, though. In the Pathfinder library I’ve tried to avoid use of mandatory dependencies—that’s why it’s split up into so many crates so that you don’t get e.g. SVG parsing unless you need it. But the examples use tons of dependencies, because they’re examples.
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Rolling my own code to do basic things makes the examples worse, because the point is to illustrate how to use the library and any boilerplate is just noise. Including e.g. code to open a window on Win32 would scare potential users away. So I think dependencies are nuanced.
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agreed. I think more visibility & some tweaks in multiple places would help everyone think about it more. for example http://crates.io could show an additional flat list of default transitive dependencies of a crate, to more easily show what it actually brings in
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we were using the color-backtrace crate, which is really nice, but we realized afterwards that it added an additional 15 transitive deps which wasn't obvious at a first glance on https://crates.io/crates/color-backtrace …. still likely works for most, and is a good crate, but was too much for us
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